The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, by Michel de Montaigne

Chapter 3

That Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us

Such as accuse mankind of the folly of gaping after future things, and advise us to make our benefit
of those which are present, and to set up our rest upon them, as having no grasp upon that which is to come, even less
than that which we have upon what is past, have hit upon the most universal of human errors, if that may be called an
error to which nature herself has disposed us, in order to the continuation of her own work, prepossessing us, amongst
several others, with this deceiving imagination, as being more jealous of our action than afraid of our knowledge.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves: fear, desire, hope, still push us on towards the future,
depriving us, in the meantime, of the sense and consideration of that which is to amuse us with the thought of what
shall be, even when we shall be no more. 1

We find this great precept often repeated in Plato, “Do thine own work, and know thyself.” Of which two parts, both
the one and the other generally, comprehend our whole duty, and do each of them in like manner involve the other; for
who will do his own work aright will find that his first lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to
himself; and who rightly understands himself will never mistake another man’s work for his own, but will love and
improve himself above all other things, will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all unprofitable thoughts and
propositions. As folly, on the one side, though it should enjoy all it desire, would notwithstanding never be content,
so, on the other, wisdom, acquiescing in the present, is never dissatisfied with itself. 3 Epicurus dispenses his sages from all foresight and care of the future.

Amongst those laws that relate to the dead, I look upon that to be very sound by which the actions of princes are to
be examined after their decease. 4 They are equals with, if
not masters of the laws, and, therefore, what justice could not inflict upon their persons, ’tis but reason should be
executed upon their reputations and the estates of their successors — things that we often value above life itself.
’Tis a custom of singular advantage to those countries where it is in use, and by all good princes to be desired, who
have reason to take it ill, that the memories of the wicked should be used with the same reverence and respect with
their own. We owe subjection and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has respect unto
their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only due to their virtue. Let us grant to political government
to endure them with patience, however unworthy; to conceal their vices; and to assist them with our recommendation in
their indifferent actions, whilst their authority stands in need of our support. But, the relation of prince and
subject being once at an end, there is no reason we should deny the expression of our real opinions to our own liberty
and common justice, and especially to interdict to good subjects the glory of having reverently and faithfully served a
prince, whose imperfections were to them so well known; this were to deprive posterity of a useful example. And such
as, out of respect to some private obligation, unjustly espouse and vindicate the memory of a faulty prince, do private
right at the expense of public justice. Livy does very truly say, 5 “That the language of men bred up in courts is always full of vain ostentation and false
testimony, every one indifferently magnifying his own master, and stretching his commendation to the utmost extent of
virtue and sovereign grandeur.” Some may condemn the freedom of those two soldiers who so roundly answered Nero to his
beard; the one being asked by him why he bore him ill-will? “I loved thee,” answered he, “whilst thou wert worthy of
it, but since thou art become a parricide, an incendiary, a player, and a coachman, I hate thee as thou dost deserve.”
And the other, why he should attempt to kill him? “Because,” said he, “I could think of no other remedy against thy
perpetual mischiefs.” 6 But the public and universal
testimonies that were given of him after his death (and so will be to all posterity, both of him and all other wicked
princes like him), of his tyrannies and abominable deportment, who, of a sound judgment, can reprove them?

I am scandalised, that in so sacred a government as that of the Lacedaemonians there should be mixed so hypocritical
a ceremony at the interment of their kings; where all their confederates and neighbours, and all sorts and degrees of
men and women, as well as their slaves, cut and slashed their foreheads in token of sorrow, repeating in their cries
and lamentations that that king (let him have been as wicked as the devil) was the best that ever they had; 7 by this means attributing to his quality the praise that only
belongs to merit, and that of right is due to supreme desert, though lodged in the lowest and most inferior
subject.

Aristotle, who will still have a hand in everything, makes a ‘quaere’ upon the saying of Solon, that none can be
said to be happy until he is dead: “whether, then, he who has lived and died according to his heart’s desire, if he
have left an ill repute behind him, and that his posterity be miserable, can be said to be happy?” Whilst we have life
and motion, we convey ourselves by fancy and preoccupation, whither and to what we please; but once out of being, we
have no more any manner of communication with that which is, and it had therefore been better said by Solon that man is
never happy, because never so, till he is no more.

Bertrand de Guesclin, dying at the siege of the Castle of Rancon, near unto Puy, in Auvergne, the besieged were
afterwards, upon surrender, enjoined to lay down the keys of the place upon the corpse of the dead general. Bartolommeo
d’Alviano, the Venetian General, happening to die in the service of the Republic in Brescia, and his corpse being to be
carried through the territory of Verona, an enemy’s country, most of the army were inclined to demand safe-conduct from
the Veronese; but Theodoro Trivulzio opposed the motion, rather choosing to make his way by force of arms, and to run
the hazard of a battle, saying it was by no means fit that he who in his life was never afraid of his enemies should
seem to apprehend them when he was dead. In truth, in affairs of the same nature, by the Greek laws, he who made suit
to an enemy for a body to give it burial renounced his victory, and had no more right to erect a trophy, and he to whom
such suit was made was reputed victor. By this means it was that Nicias lost the advantage he had visibly obtained over
the Corinthians, and that Agesilaus, on the contrary, assured that which he had before very doubtfully gained over the
Boeotians. 9

These things might appear strange, had it not been a general practice in all ages not only to extend the concern of
ourselves beyond this life, but, moreover, to fancy that the favour of Heaven does not only very often accompany us to
the grave, but has also, even after life, a concern for our ashes. Of which there are so many ancient examples (to say
nothing of those of our own observation), that it is not necessary I should longer insist upon it. Edward I., King of
England, having in the long wars betwixt him and Robert, King of Scotland, had experience of how great importance his
own immediate presence was to the success of his affairs, having ever been victorious in whatever he undertook in his
own person, when he came to die, bound his son in a solemn oath that, so soon as he should be dead he should boil his
body till the flesh parted from the bones, and bury the flesh, reserving the bones to carry continually with him in his
army, so often as he should be obliged to go against the Scots, as if destiny had inevitably attached victory, even to
his remains. John Zisca, the same who, to vindication of Wicliffe’s heresies, troubled the Bohemian state, left order
that they should flay him after his death, and of his skin make a drum to carry in the war against his enemies,
fancying it would contribute to the continuation of the successes he had always obtained in the wars against them. In
like manner certain of the Indians, in their battles with the Spaniards, carried with them the bones of one of their
captains, in consideration of the victories they had formerly obtained under his conduct. And other people of the same
New World carry about with them, in their wars, the relics of valiant men who have died in battle, to incite their
courage and advance their fortune. Of which examples the first reserve nothing for the tomb but the reputation they
have acquired by their former achievements, but these attribute to them a certain present and active power.

The proceeding of Captain Bayard is of a better composition, who finding himself wounded to death with an harquebuss
shot, and being importuned to retire out of the fight, made answer that he would not begin at the last gasp to turn his
back to the enemy, and accordingly still fought on, till feeling himself too faint and no longer able to sit on his
horse, he commanded his steward to set him down at the foot of a tree, but so that he might die with his face towards
the enemy, which he did.

I must yet add another example, equally remarkable for the present consideration with any of the former. The Emperor
Maximilian, great-grandfather to the now King Philip, 10
was a prince endowed throughout with great and extraordinary qualities, and amongst the rest with a singular beauty of
person, but had withal a humour very contrary to that of other princes, who for the despatch of their most important
affairs convert their close-stool into a chair of State, which was, that he would never permit any of his bedchamber,
how familiar soever, to see him in that posture, and would steal aside to make water as religiously as a virgin, shy to
discover to his physician or any other whomsoever those parts that we are accustomed to conceal. I myself, who have so
impudent a way of talking, am, nevertheless, naturally so modest this way, that unless at the importunity of necessity
or pleasure, I scarcely ever communicate to the sight of any either those parts or actions that custom orders us to
conceal, wherein I suffer more constraint than I conceive is very well becoming a man, especially of my profession. But
he nourished this modest humour to such a degree of superstition as to give express orders in his last will that they
should put him on drawers so soon as he should be dead; to which, methinks, he would have done well to have added that
he should be blindfolded, too, that put them on. The charge that Cyrus left with his children, that neither they, nor
any other, should either see or touch his body after the soul was departed from it, 11 I attribute to some superstitious devotion of his; for both his historian
and himself, amongst their great qualities, marked the whole course of their lives with a singular respect and
reverence to religion.

I was by no means pleased with a story, told me by a man of very great quality of a relation of mine, and one who
had given a very good account of himself both in peace and war, that, coming to die in a very old age, of excessive
pain of the stone, he spent the last hours of his life in an extraordinary solicitude about ordering the honour and
ceremony of his funeral, pressing all the men of condition who came to see him to engage their word to attend him to
his grave: importuning this very prince, who came to visit him at his last gasp, with a most earnest supplication that
he would order his family to be there, and presenting before him several reasons and examples to prove that it was a
respect due to a man of his condition; and seemed to die content, having obtained this promise, and appointed the
method and order of his funeral parade. I have seldom heard of so persistent a vanity.

Another, though contrary curiosity (of which singularity, also, I do not want domestic example), seems to be
somewhat akin to this, that a man shall cudgel his brains at the last moments of his life to contrive his obsequies to
so particular and unusual a parsimony as of one servant with a lantern, I see this humour commended, and the
appointment of Marcus. Emilius Lepidus, who forbade his heirs to bestow upon his hearse even the common ceremonies in
use upon such occasions. Is it yet temperance and frugality to avoid expense and pleasure of which the use and
knowledge are imperceptible to us? See, here, an easy and cheap reformation. If instruction were at all necessary in
this case, I should be of opinion that in this, as in all other actions of life, each person should regulate the matter
according to his fortune; and the philosopher Lycon prudently ordered his friends to dispose of his body where they
should think most fit, and as to his funeral, to order it neither too superfluous nor too mean. For my part, I should
wholly refer the ordering of this ceremony to custom, and shall, when the time comes, accordingly leave it to their
discretion to whose lot it shall fall to do me that last office. “Totus hic locus est contemnendus in nobis, non
negligendus in nostris;” 12 and it was a holy saying of a
saint, “Curatio funeris, conditio sepultura: pompa exequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solatia, quam subsidia mortuorum.”
13 Which made Socrates answer Crito, who, at death, asked
him how he would be buried: “How you will,” said he. “If I were to concern myself beyond the present about this affair,
I should be most tempted, as the greatest satisfaction of this kind, to imitate those who in their lifetime entertain
themselves with the ceremony and honours of their own obsequies beforehand, and are pleased with beholding their own
dead countenance in marble. Happy are they who can gratify their senses by insensibility, and live by their death!”

I am ready to conceive an implacable hatred against all popular domination, though I think it the most natural and
equitable of all, so oft as I call to mind the inhuman injustice of the people of Athens, who, without remission, or
once vouchsafing to hear what they had to say for themselves, put to death their brave captains newly returned
triumphant from a naval victory they had obtained over the Lacedaemonians near the Arginusian Isles, the most bloody
and obstinate engagement that ever the Greeks fought at sea; because (after the victory) they followed up the blow and
pursued the advantages presented to them by the rule of war, rather than stay to gather up and bury their dead. And the
execution is yet rendered more odious by the behaviour of Diomedon, who, being one of the condemned, and a man of most
eminent virtue, political and military, after having heard the sentence, advancing to speak, no audience till then
having been allowed, instead of laying before them his own cause, or the impiety of so cruel a sentence, only expressed
a solicitude for his judges’ preservation, beseeching the gods to convert this sentence to their good, and praying
that, for neglecting to fulfil the vows which he and his companions had made (with which he also acquainted them) in
acknowledgment of so glorious a success, they might not draw down the indignation of the gods upon them; and so without
more words went courageously to his death.

Fortune, a few years after, punished them in the same kind; for Chabrias, captain-general of their naval forces,
having got the better of Pollis, Admiral of Sparta, at the Isle of Naxos, totally lost the fruits of his victory, one
of very great importance to their affairs, in order not to incur the danger of this example, and so that he should not
lose a few bodies of his dead friends that were floating in the sea, gave opportunity to a world of living enemies to
sail away in safety, who afterwards made them pay dear for this unseasonable superstition:—

As nature demonstrates to us that several dead things retain yet an occult relation to life; wine changes its
flavour and complexion in cellars, according to the changes and seasons of the vine from whence it came; and the flesh
of — venison alters its condition in the powdering-tub, and its taste according to the laws of the living flesh of its
kind, as it is said.

8 “Scarcely one man can, even in dying, wholly detach himself from
the idea of life; in his ignorance he must needs imagine that there is in him something that survives him, and cannot
sufficiently separate or emancipate himself from his remains” — Lucretius, iii. 890.